Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

Walking into the Tate Modern and seeing a huge working fountain was incredible. I spent some time just sitting next to it and drawing. I absolutely love it, the shapes created by the clay mould the characters so well. They are so interesting and so much fun to draw from. The photos were taken on my phone and I think they capture the unique structures of the figures well. The emotion and history is really captured within the figures and I can feel the stories that are missing from the history books.

‘My work has always been a time machine looking backwards across decades and centuries to arrive at some understanding of my “place” in the contemporary moment.’ – Kara Walker

Kara Walker explores ideas around identity, race, sexuality and violence in her artwork through a variety of mediums including painting, printmaking, installation. This four-tiered fountain both questions how we remember history in our public monuments and presents a narrative on the origins of the African diaspora.

Fons Americanus is inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London a celebration of the British Empire. However, Walker’s fountain inverts the usual function of memorial and questions narratives of power, focusing on those not normally focused on in capitalist society. The interconnected histories of Africa, America and Europe are explored, with water as a key theme of the transatlantic slave trade. Including the ambitions, fates, and tragedies of people from these three continents, bringing the narrative in the form of an allegory or fable.

The full title of the work is painted on the wall of the Turbine Hall. Written in Walker’s own words, the text encourages us to confront a history often misremembered in the UK. She presents the artwork as a ‘gift … to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world’. Walker has signed the work ‘Kara Walker, NTY’, or ‘Not Titled Yet’, in a play on British honours awards such as ‘OBE’ (Order of the British Empire).

I want to do even more drawings from these images, they are incredible and there is this intimacy and personal feeling in the fountain. I also plan to use it for my essay alongside my research from the Gender exhibition at the Science Gallery.